Is 'black-on-black crime' a blast from the past?

David Wilson, author of "Inventing Black-On-Black Violence" and Harold Collins, Memphis Shelby Crime Commission vice president for community engagement, say "black-on-black crime" should be left in the past.
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October 20, 2016 - Teddy bears plastic-wrapped to a pole and a fence spray-painted with condolences mark the scene along Vollintine Avenue near Northside High School in North Memphis where Demarious Harris, 16, was found suffering from a gunshot would to the head in October 2015. Johntavius Griggs, 20, was indicted on first-degree murder charges for the shooting.(Photo: Brad Vest/The Commercial Appeal)Buy Photo

“I think it is an outdated concept and a concept used to stereotype a certain segment of our community that faces serious obstacles for their everyday lives,” said Collins, a former member of the Memphis City Council.

An Illinois college professor and author of the 2005 book “Inventing Black-On-Black Violence” traces the earliest uses of the term to the media — a magazine long-serving African Americans and a major Chicago newspaper.

David Wilson, a geography professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said an article in Jet magazine in the 1970s about the emerging trend of “black-on-black violence” in American cities was the first source he found to use the phrase.

The second, in 1980-81, was a five-part series in the Chicago Tribune called “Winter Wave of Violence” that was widely read, Wilson said.

Some believe the term "black-on-black crime" is an outdated stereotypical term.(Photo: Carole Gomez, Getty Images/iStockphoto)

“And then people from all kinds of political persuasions picked up the term,” he said.

“What fed into the process I think was the 1980s. The rise of Reagan and neoconservatism and that political persuasion was especially strong at asserting the reality of this thing called black-on-black violence,” Wilson said.

He thinks the term helped drive the neoconservative political agenda in the 1980s and helped fuel filling prisons with what critics call “mass incarceration” policies.

“And, by the way, it’s with us very much to this day, the neoconservative agenda in American cities,” Wilson said. “Look at (President) Trump.”

Wilson said the “black-on-black” description racialized violence.

“Especially in the 1980s, when you racialize the term, it conjures up all the imagery of black subculture, the black inner city and defective cultures and African-American neighborhoods, those sorts of things,” he said.

Violence is “multi-interpretable” and a term better-suited for framing public policy would point to the real roots of violent crime, such as dysfunctional labor markets for low-income young people and inequality, Wilson said.

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Black clergy hold hands in prayer during a meeting at LeMoyne-Owen College to issue a call to end black-on-black crime on Saturday, March 4, 2017. "This event was an opportunity to bring together black clergy from different denominations ... all here together as a unit to call upon our people in our communities, to African Americans, to please stop the killing," said Reginald Porter, pastor of Metropolitan Baptist Church. "We want to put an end to it, to bring about more peace and harmony in our communities."(Photo: Yalonda M. James/The Commercial Appeal)

“Why not term it poverty youth-on-poverty youth violence or disadvantaged youth-on-disadvantaged youth violence?” he said.

Collins, who spent a dozen years in the Shelby County District Attorney’s Office as a special assistant focused on violent juvenile crime and truancy, also pointed to issues beyond race.

“When it’s so easy to get a gun or an AR-15 or an AK-47 in your community, but it’s difficult to get a driver’s license or a voter’s registration card or a quality education, those are the crime challenges that we face,” he said.

High homicide rates among young African-American men provide the most concrete foundation for the “black-on-black” term. Of the record 228 homicide victims in Memphis last year, 200, or about 88 percent, were African Americans.

Nationwide, a black perpetrator was responsible in 90 percent of murders of black victims, and a white perpetrator was responsible in 82 percent of murders of white victims, FBI statistics for 2014 show.

“The numbers don’t lie,” Collins said. “When I worked at 201 Poplar (the Shelby County Criminal Justice Center), you go through General Sessions and you see a carpet of black people.”

“That doesn’t make it a black-on-black issue, that makes it an issue of how do we deal with the fact that so many people in our culture are settling disputes with violence?” he said.

Collins said the black-on-black crime forum at LeMoyne-Owen College, where he was a panelist, was in response to several shootings in the college’s South Memphis neighborhood, where a 39-year-old man was discovered Friday stabbed to death.

“I don’t think that blackness is responsible for the violence and I don’t think black culture is responsible for the violence,” Wilson said.

“I would bet that if there is a massive job creation program, where everybody who wanted to work in Memphis and in the black community in Memphis were able to get decent employment, many of the problems like ‘black-on-black’ violence would disappear,” he said.